


Duty & Delinquency

by orphan_account



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Hospital, Canon Divergence - Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Doctor Natasha, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Nurse Steve, Psychological Trauma, Veteran Bucky
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-05-08
Updated: 2015-05-20
Packaged: 2018-03-29 13:49:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,776
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3898648
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Are you seriously recommending that I ask a catatonic patient out on a date?” Steve asks.<br/>“Of course not,” Natasha corrects, “I’m recommending that you ask Bucky Barnes out on a date when he’s no longer a catatonic patient.”</p><p>***</p><p>Bucky is a veteran in a bad state, Steve is his nurse, Natasha is trying to set them up, and there's a whole lot of mindfuckery going on behind the scenes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hey folks. Long time no post. 
> 
> I've been spending way too much time in the hospital lately (as a visitor, not a patient). I also read a lot of Captain America comics while I was there, so I thought I'd go ahead and make a fic of it because reasons. 
> 
> tbh I have no idea where I'm going with this, but if you dig it, let me know. If you're not into it then I'll move on to something else. It's just a side project for me to fiddle with while I'm working on my novel, which is, as always, slow goings. 
> 
> Please note trigger warnings for psych wards and catatonic states. I'll be updating the tags as I go so please check them as the chapters post.
> 
> Please also note that I'm not really aiming for accuracy here, and I probably got lots of stuff wrong re: health and hospitals because I'm writing this as a series of 1k1hs. For this reason I have disabled anon commenting. You can call me out if something is wrong, but please do it politely.
> 
> Big thanks and many squishes to my beta [shiphitsthefan](http://archiveofourown.org/users/shiphitsthefan). They are the wind beneath my air ducts.

Steve knocks on the open door of room 2517. "May I come in?"

The patient doesn't stir or speak. He stares out the window to the Washington D.C. suburbia below and the quickly rising sun over the horizon, one hand on his stomach and the other missing entirely, just as he’s been every day for the past three weeks.

Steve walks in anyway, dry erase marker twirling in his fingers. He uses the side of his hand to wipe away the name 'Clint' in the nurse field of the information chart and writes his own with a smiley face at the end. He caps the marker and slides it into the breast pocket of his navy blue scrubs, next to his pen light and vintage Bugs Bunny Pez dispenser.

"So," Steve begins, leaning onto the railing at the end of the bed. "How are you doing today, James?"

The patient doesn’t respond, makes no indication that he heard Steve speak at all. He blinks slowly on occasion, and his index finger twitches where a pulse monitor is hooked up to it.

"No difference then," Steve says. He moves to the side of the bed and wraps a blood pressure cuff around James' bicep. Steve puts the stethoscope in his ears and listens to his pulse. The results show on the monitor, but Steve’s a creature of old habits.

"Blood pressure's a bit high. Are you feeling anxious?" Steve asks, uselessly.

The man continues being non-responsive, and Steve goes to the computer in the corner of the room to input his vitals. Their system lists the patient’s name as James Barnes, but they don’t have much else on him; they found him on a bench outside the VA with nothing but the scraps of clothing on his back and a set of dog tags around his neck. Sam is still working on putting together the rest of his file, piece by piece to figure out if there’s anyone out there looking for him.

More than likely, though, he’s another homeless vet with untreated mental illnesses, having fought for their country only to be dumped and discarded once no longer needed. It makes Steve sick to think about, how much he loves his country but how much he hates the way it takes care of its soldiers, its sick and elderly, its immigrants.

James was already missing the arm when they found him, but the amputation was clean, healed over like it occurred years ago.

He’d been in the hospital for three weeks now. They gave him a number of tests, and by all accounts can't find a single thing wrong with his brain, yet he's still catatonic. He won't speak to anyone, make eye contact, move, or eat. Steve has taken care of him during every one of his shifts, three days a week, twelve hours a day. Even though James doesn’t interact with him, Steve has built up a kind of comfort around him. Room 2517 is a calming place for him now, where he can talk about whatever, whistle or sing while taking James’ vitals. He finds himself looking forward to it.

Steve clicks a couple times on the computer. "Blood sugar's low, too. You could really stand to eat, James. Doughnuts are so much more satisfying than an IV drip."

James mumbles a reply.

"Whoa," Steve says, shoving the computer away and squatting down at the side of James' bed, into his line of vision. "Hey buddy, can you repeat that?"

James mumbles something else.

"Still didn’t catch it. One more time," Steve urges.

"Bucky," the man repeats, clearer now. He makes eye contact with Steve for the first time, startling blue eyes piercing and focused. "I go by Bucky."

Steve smiles. "Bucky it is, then. Can you tell me anything else about yourself, Bucky?"

But the moment is gone. Bucky's eyes glaze over again, and even though he's staring in Steve's direction, it's far-off, unseeing.

Steve sighs, shoulders slumping. "We'll try again in a couple hours." He stands to input Bucky's vitals into his file, and adds, "Dr. Romanoff will be checking on you a bit later."

Before he leaves, he erases 'James' from the patient's name field on the wall chart and replaces it with 'Bucky'.

#

The sky is fading to orange when Steve's shift ends. He throws on his bomber jacket and shoulders his backpack, but before he leaves, he stops in room 2517 and knocks softly. "May I come in?"

He pauses this time with an ounce of hope, but when Bucky doesn't reply, he enters the room anyway. Pietro's name has already replaced his own on the chart, the smiley face elaborated with red dry erase marker, whooshing lines like in comic books.

Steve takes a seat at Bucky's bedside in the chairs that are always empty. He hates cases like Bucky's—young guy back from the desert front lines, lost and alone, tortured and broken. 

Steve remembers what it was like, back when he was a field medic. He made it home in one piece, but he knows enough soldiers who didn't. After his last term, he came back, got an RN job in the psych unit of Stark Memorial VA, and hasn't looked back.

He reaches into his backpack and pulls out a ragged old copy of _Starship Troopers_.

Most of his coworkers have someone to go home to, but since the only thing at home waiting for Steve is some leftover pizza, he’s begun staying an hour or two after all of his shifts to read to Bucky. He didn’t ask if he could, didn’t say anything about it, just started doing it the day Bucky was admitted and hasn’t stopped.

He’s not sure why he’s so drawn to this room, to James Barnes. They don’t even know each other, not really; he just has these vague approximations of the person he thinks Bucky is, but he could be completely wrong.

Still, there’s something keeping him at Bucky’s bedside every night, and he doesn’t know what it is.

Bucky is staring out at the sunset, hair in messy waves falling down to his shoulders. The age from the date of birth on his dog tags doesn’t feel accurate, because while his face looks to be in his twenties, the haunted shadow in his eyes ages him.

As Steve stares at him, he can’t get those five little words out of his head: _Bucky. I go by Bucky_. They echo in his mind and bounce around, churn in his gut. They answer so many questions, but ask dozens more. The look in Bucky's eye burned him to his very center, unsettling and thrilling at the same time. Steve wants to know where Bucky came from, how this happened to him. He wants to push Bucky’s progress so he can work with the VA’s social worker, Sam, to help him get back on his feet, apply for a good prosthetic and move on.

But Bucky’s not moving anywhere right now.

He pulls the bookmark out of his book—a second place ribbon from the hospital’s annual 5k race (Pietro placed first and Sam third)—and finds where they left off yesterday.

" _'I told you that 'juvenile delinquent' is a contradiction in terms,'"_ Steve begins, "' _'Delinquent' means 'failing in duty.' But duty is an adult virtue—indeed a juvenile becomes an adult when, and only when, he acquires a knowledge of duty and embraces it as dearer than the self-love he was born with. There never was, there cannot be a 'juvenile delinquent.' But for every juvenile criminal there are always one or more adult delinquents—people of mature years who either do not know their duty, or who, knowing it, fail...'_ "

#

Steve rubs at his temples as he does his rounds bright and early the next day. He tries not to go out on work nights, but Sam dragged his sorry ass to a bar to watch the game, and four hours later, he was shoving Steve into a cab and telling him to sleep it off before his seven a.m. to seven p.m. shift the next morning.

He doesn't bother knocking on the door of 2517, doesn't ask how Bucky's doing. The guy's not paying attention anyway. He erases Pietro's name from the chart and puts his own, pointedly erasing the whooshing smiley face, because there's not going to be much smiling today, not when Steve feels like he could hurl his guts onto the floor at any moment.

"What, no, 'May I come in? How are you feeling today, James?'" Bucky asks behind him in a cartoonish approximation of Steve's voice. He speaks casually, like they talk every day. And they do, Steve realizes, but Bucky doesn't usually talk back.

Steve whirls on his heel, awestruck. "You're awake."

For the first time, he considers the possibility that Bucky has been listening to him this whole time.

"I'm catatonic, not comatose," Bucky says with a small upward twitch of his lips.

Steve gropes at the com on his hip pocket. "Holy crap, hold on, let me get—"

Bucky interrupts him. "Wait."

Steve stops and asks, "What?"

"I don't," Bucky begins, but furrows his brow like he's struggling to find the words, to keep himself in the present, "I don't know how long I got before they pull me back under, but I just wanted to say thank you." He smiles a little again, boyish and shy, and it makes something ache in Steve's heart that he doesn't have time to process because he needs to get a psychiatrist in, stat.

He’s frozen to the spot, though, staring into blue eyes that are actually staring back at him for the second time, sending an unfamiliar shiver down his spine. 

Steve shakes his head out of its stupor. "Bucky, I gotta get Romanoff..." He trails off, because Bucky's vision clouds over again, head dropping back to the pillow. Steve immediately sinks down at his bedside and pulls out his pen light, shines it in Bucky's eyes to gauge his response. He gets nothing but the autonomic dilating of pupils.

“Buck, c'mon, come back to me," he mutters, checking Bucky's pulse at his neck.

It's slow and even.

Steve sighs and rocks back on his heels, slumps to the ground and leans against the wall.

"What did you mean by 'they'?" he asks into the air.

#

Hours later finds him on his lunch break, bored in the cafeteria and reading the nutrition label of his personal-sized package of Cheerios. Romanoff is silent across from him, tapping away on her phone faster than Steve can comprehend. He prefers using a flip phone—every time he touches one of those touchy-screens, he’s convinced his big, beefy fingers are going to crush it.

“How’s Bucky?” Natasha asks without looking up.

“No change,” Steve replies around a bite of cereal.

“He hasn’t woken up for anyone else, you know,” she says, finally looking up at him with an arched eyebrow.

Steve huffs a laugh. “That doesn’t mean anything.”

“Sure it does. You spend more time with him than anyone else. You read to him. You’re there for him when no one else is.”

He levels a glare at her. “Just spit it out and tell me what are you getting at.”

Her lip twitches like it does when she’s trying to hide a smile behind her mask of impenetrable professionalism. Thankfully, Steve’s worked with her long enough that he can call her bullshit better than just about anyone else, except for maybe Clint.

She shrugs, a small movement of one shoulder while she looks back down at her phone and says, “Just seems like you got a thing for him is all.”

Steve nearly chokes on his cereal. “I _what?_ ”

Natasha scoffs and replies, “Oh come on. He’s totally your type. Buff, rugged, tortured-soul. Strong and silent. Don’t tell me you haven’t thought about it.”

“Excuse you, he’s a patient!”

She shoots him a devious grin. “But he won’t be for long if we do our jobs right.”

“Are you seriously recommending that I ask a catatonic patient out on a date?” Steve asks.

“Of course not,” Natasha corrects, “I’m recommending that you ask Bucky Barnes out on a date when he’s no longer a catatonic patient.”

Steve sits back in his chair and stares at her in a mix of confusion and awe. “We don’t know anything about him.”

She shrugs. “I just have a feeling. Call it psychiatrist’s intuition.”

“Psychiatrists don’t have intuition. That’s why they’re psychiatrists.”

She glares at him. “Ha ha,” she says pointedly, and adds, “Just keep talking to him. Whatever you’re doing, I think it’s working.”

#

Steve hesitates in front of room 2517, palms sweatier than they should be given that he’s just making his afternoon rounds.

He knocks on the door and asks, “May I come in?”

No answer. He walks in anyway.

“How are you feeling this afternoon, Bucky?”

Still no answer. Bucky stares out the window the same as he does every day, rumpled blue gown covering his body and blankets folded neatly over him.

Steve glances out the door for passers-by. “Alright,” he begins, and takes the seat he usually does after his shift. He normally doesn’t like to sit down while he’s working, because it’s just that much harder to get back up, especially when he’s with patients, but if talking to Bucky is what’s going to do the trick, then he considers it his duty to at least try.

“So,” he says, elbows on his knees and hands clasped between them. He pauses, because he has no idea what to talk about now that he's actually _trying_ to talk, now that he thinks Bucky might be listening. The weather seems kind of pointless. Politics are too messy. It occurs to him that in the grand scheme of things, he’s kind of a boring person. Nevertheless, he begins, “My name is Steve Rogers. I’m a certified EMT and RN. I served one term in Iraq and one in Afghanistan. I’m thirty-one. I run five miles every morning—well, not this morning, I was hungover this morning—and paint at night. I enjoy long walks on the beach and good conversation over wine...” He sighs and lets his head drop. “This is ridiculous,” he mutters to the floor. “No one wants to hear this.”

“Sure I do. What do you paint?”

Steve’s head snaps back up, and he’s met with the striking gaze of Bucky again.

“Bucky,” he says, sliding to the edge of his seat, gripping one of the handles of the bed. “How are you feeling?”

Bucky shrugs, easy, like this is a question he answers frequently. “Not great. It’s good to be here though.”

Steve grips the handle until his knuckles turn white. “What do you mean? The VA or—”

“Now,” Bucky clarifies with a nod. “This world.”

“’This world’? What does that mean?”

Bucky averts his eyes, picks up his hand and inspects the pulse monitor on his finger with curiosity. “I can’t talk about it. They’ll pull me back in if they know I’m trying to escape.”

“Okay,” Steve replies slowly, mind reeling, and opts to change tactics. “Do you know where you’re from? Do you have any family we should contact?”

Bucky looks off into the distance and smiles sadly. It takes him so long to reply that Steve worries he’s left again, but then he says, “No. To either question.” He looks again at Steve, panic seeping into his face. “But is it okay that I’m here? I really don’t wanna be a burden. I feel like I’m taking up a bed someone else should have.” He shifts like he’s about to stand up and leave, but Steve puts a hand on his arm.

“Whoa there. You can’t leave just yet. And you’re not a burden, I promise,” Steve replies, and Bucky sinks back down onto the bed.

“Are you sure?” he asks, visibly relaxing.

Steve smiles. “I’m sure.”

Bucky’s stare goes out of focus for a moment, but then he grits his teeth and furrows his brow like he’s in pain, reaches up and grips Steve’s hand on his shoulder. Their eyes lock, and Bucky says with a regretful shake of his head, “They’re going at me again. I have to go. But I’ll be back, I promise.”

His head drops onto the pillow, and he’s gone, but his fingers are still gripping Steve’s. His hand is rough and callused, a soldier’s hand, and it takes Steve a long time before he can let go.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know I suck at replying to comments, but while this is a WIP I'm going to reply to them as best I can, so...comment away!
> 
> Thank you for the positivity on the first chapter! Hopefully you'll like this chapter too. 
> 
> Random note: I know I put this in the Marvel, Avenger, and Captain America movie fandoms, but just in case you want to call me out on discrepancies, I'm taking from movie canon, comic canon, and fanon, the lines between which are fairly thin anyway.
> 
> Beta'd by the lovely [eveanyn](http://www.eveanyn.tumblr.com).

The chamber is the worst part. Inside it, he is no one. He feels and thinks nothing. When he’s awake, alive, he navigates his reality without a true foundation underneath his feet, but in stasis, he lacks the opportunity to live in reality at all. It’s like being dead, but not really.

Time no longer exists. He no longer exists.

They drag him out of stasis for missions. It’s like being born, but not really.

They give him an identity, if he needs one. They provide him training, if he needs it. They debrief him and send him off into the barren cold of Russia with everything he should need in a rucksack at his feet, plowing through snow in the back of a Range Rover skidding on ice.

He hunts. He fights. He kills.

And he goes back.

He doesn’t know much about his reality at any given time, but when he returns—injured, usually, sometimes badly, sometimes worse—there’s always a sharp sense of dread in his gut. He wracks his mind for why, because all he knows is the shortness of life; all he knows is the creation of death. There is nothing more than the mission.

Yet still, the closer he is to the stasis chamber, the worse the panic gets.

When his heart—old, too old to continue beating—stutters in his chest and his skin feels flush despite the cold, it kicks something on in his mind. A sharp, shooting pain in his temples brings with it too many memories. He remembers the hundreds of times he’s been tethered to a chair, guard shoved between his teeth so that he doesn’t bite his tongue out. He remembers the distinct feel of wires connected to his head, and the slow clacking of an engine as it turns. Everything goes white-hot, fire ripping through his mind and burning away the seconds of fleeting memory that dragged itself back into his consciousness.

The whiteness turns to blackness, and he feels his body—empty and useless, like a gun without bullets—lowered into the viscous liquid of the stasis chamber.

He dies, then.

But not really.

#

He hears beeping in the distance. An iron cuff secures his flesh-and-bone wrist to the arm of a chair. His other arm is disconnected from his brain, so it lay useless at his side, hanging heavy on his shoulder. His body is covered in sweat. It tickles as it falls down his face and neck and chest. Everything is over-sensitized, too bright, too loud. The beeping grows louder. He is mildly aware of panicked voices around him, of footsteps darting back and forth.

The engine beside him sputters to a halt, and the beeping slows until it stops.

Pain shoots through his body in waves, a throbbing tsunami that catches the breath in his throat until it’s over. Each one is like the beat of his overburdened heart, and a flash of something else takes form within the seconds of agony:

Sun shining on his face through a window overlooking a familiar city. A soft knock on a door. A man asking, _“May I come in?”_ Heavy footsteps on linoleum.

 _“How are you feeling today, James?”_ the man asks.

No reply escapes his lips. He’s gagged by the guard in his teeth, paralyzed by pain.

The man steps into the sunlight, into his vision, smiling down at him. It creates a halo around his head, the silhouette of broad shoulders and neatly combed blond hair.

_“No better, huh?”_

There is beeping in this world as well, higher pitched than the broken engine. It beats in time with his heart, and though he cannot see it, he feels the pinch of a clip on his index finger, adhesive tape wrapped around it. He focuses on it, and moves it.

The man sees.

_“Well that’s an improvement at least.”_

He can communicate in this world, he realizes, if he focuses. This man, with the crooked smile and the blue eyes, can see him. He can help.

A surge of something that he remembers as _hope_ floods his chest and overtakes the pain. It makes the agony bearable, knowing that there might be an end to it.

The men operating the engine give up. Before the procedure is complete, he is thrown into an empty room, because an urgent voice had said, “He cannot go back into stasis. It will turn his mind to ash.”

“What will we do with him?” another voice asked.

“We will fix the device, and then complete the procedure,” the first voice replied. “Operation: Winter Soldier will commence as planned. Leave him be for now.”

The room is cold and empty—walls of iron, floor of cement. He feels weak and tired. He can barely move.

But for the first time, he does not feel alone.

Hope is his first true memory, of life before the chamber. It opens the doors to many others that make their way back into his mind with slow, unbalanced steps.

He is Bucky, a soldier, a veteran, but he does not yet remember the war. He is being cared for, though he doesn’t know why. In this other world, a team of individuals check on him at regular intervals. They run tests on his brain, though they cannot find results that satisfy their curiosity.

He is poked and prodded. His body does not know hunger or thirst.

The handsome man is there, though, always smiling, always talking, always caring.

Some nights, he comes to Bucky as the sun sets, takes a seat beside him, and reads. Bucky focuses on the words. When the man is away, Bucky focuses on the movement of his finger. He makes progress. It is slow, but steady, and as time passes, Bucky improves.

The bright ball of hope continues to well within his chest and defies the darkness forever ebbing away at his mind. Hope has a crooked smile and blue eyes, and always asks him how he’s feeling.

Hope will save him from the chamber.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please note, to my knowledge the token concept isn't anywhere but my own head. It's something I came up with to help me with my lucid dream/dual consciousness states.
> 
> TW this chapter for mental health stigma and skepticism. 
> 
> Chapter beta'd by the amaze [eveanyn](http://www.eveanyn.tumblr.com) and [shiphitsthefan](http://archiveofourown.org/users/shiphitsthefan).

Two more weeks pass. Bucky wakes up for brief blips of time, usually only when Steve is in the room. He wakes up once for Clint and twice for Pietro, but they tell Steve that it's only for a minute or two apiece, long enough for Bucky to verify where he is and ask for Steve.

On a Tuesday exactly five weeks after Bucky had been admitted, Steve is reading to him, like he does after all of his shifts. It’s been three days since Bucky last woke up, and Steve loses an ounce more hope for every day that passes.

They’re almost finished with _Starship Troopers_ , but Steve stops early to go home so he can fix dinner instead of heating up leftovers tonight. He unzips his pack to drop his book inside when Bucky stirs and asks, "Why'd you stop?"

It takes Steve by surprise. He hesitates, but plasters on a smile before looking up, and says, "Welcome back. How long you been topside?"

Bucky shrugs. "Hard to say. Sometimes it's like looking through a telescope. I can see you and hear you, but you're far away. I feel like I have to run a marathon to get here."

"How are you feeling then?"

Bucky looks at him and smiles. "You're not working right now."

"Just because I'm off the clock doesn't mean you stop being my patient."

Bucky's smile turns into a slow grin and Steve spends too many seconds staring at his mouth, full lips and perfect teeth. Steve wants to memorize it, go home and sketch it out so he doesn’t forget.

Because he knows it won't last.

"Is that why you're not running off to get Romanoff?" Bucky asks.

"Every time I try, you leave again."

"So you're going to stay."

"If you're here, I'm here."

"Seems like you're going beyond the call of duty there, Nurse Rogers."

The way Bucky looks at him is decidedly lascivious, a teasing lilt to his voice that makes Steve look down at his hands and blush. He doesn't even remember the last time anyone made him blush.

"What can I say," Steve replies, "I'm a sucker for a Brooklyn accent."

Bucky raises his eyebrows. "Yeah? You from there?"

"Born and raised. You?"

Steve regrets it immediately after he asks, worried that indicating anything but the immediate present will pull Bucky back to where he was, but instead, Bucky shakes his head and says, "If I have the accent, I must be. Or—"

"Or?"

He grins again and says, "Maybe my subconscious picked up on yours and wants to impress you."

Steve blushes again and looks down at the book still curled in his grip.

"Is it working?" Bucky asks.

"Maybe."

"Hmm. Sounds like I could do better. Any tips on upping my game?"

"If you stick around, I'm sure I can think of something."

"Well if that doesn't motivate me to stay topside, I don't know what will."

Steve looks down again to hide the blush still burning his cheeks, and picks at the bent corner of the paperback in his hands. "I know you don't want to talk about this, but I’d like to understand where it is you're going when you're, you know, gone."

Bucky's smile fades and his head falls back against the pillow. Steve would think he left again, but Bucky blinks and chews on his lower lip.

"I don't wanna sound crazy," he says.

"I'm a psych nurse. Trust me, ‘crazy’ doesn't even have a definition to me anymore."

Bucky pauses and takes a deep breath, squeezes his eyes shut and replies, "It's a room right now. Cold. Cement floors and metal walls, like a walk-in freezer. Cold like one, too. There are voices behind the door. It’s thick like a vault, and it's locked. There are no windows. The voices are speaking Russian."

Steve leans forward, book clasped in his hands so tightly that it curls into a cylinder. "What are they saying?"

Bucky lowers his voice and his brow furrows. He replies in Russian.

"I'm sorry,” Steve says. “I don't speak Russian. Did you know you could speak Russian?"

Bucky opens his eyes and looks at Steve again, two parts remorse and one part fear. "No. They're saying, 'We can't delay the mission.' And someone else is saying, 'He can't go out like this.'"

"What's the mission? Go out like what?"

"I don't know. I think they think there's something wrong with me."

"Is there?"

Steve means it seriously, but Bucky's cocky grin returns. "You're the psych nurse. You tell me."

And just like that, the tension breaks and Steve has to duck his head to hide his grin. He's really gotta get a check on that.

He looks up again and says, "You're something else, you know that?"

"So I've been told."

"Oh yeah?"

"I mean, no memories come to mind specifically. I'm just assuming it's something I get a lot."

Conversation is easy after that. They keep it light even though Steve knows he should dig deeper, gather information to give to Natasha so they can figure this out.

Every time he pulls a smile out of Bucky, though, it makes him forget their surroundings. He tells stories of his childhood growing up in Brooklyn. He avoids talking about his tours, even though most of his entertaining stories involve the various antics of his buddies Dum Dum, Gabe, and Jim. He tells the story about the time he got roped into playing a superhero at Clint’s daughter’s last birthday party, and how he spent the better part of five hours lifting kids above his head and flying them around the backyard. By the time he was done, he had a stitch in his side and there was no cake left, but the kids had a great time, and that’s what mattered.

Bucky listens, enrapt. He fidgets a lot when he’s awake, but Steve likes it because it means he’s here in the hospital with him and not...elsewhere, where Russians are apparently trying to send him on missions.

A few hours pass before Steve realizes that what keeps Bucky in the real world is just...treating him like he’s _in_ the real world. It doesn’t seem like it should be that simple.

He worries that it's selfish, though, to not utilize this time to test the waters, to get Bruce’s or Natasha’s attention and opinion on what’s going on.

But when it comes to Bucky, Steve reasons, maybe he’s a little selfish.

#

Steve wakes up to a light rap on the door. He jolts out of his chair to find the gray dawn rising over the DC skyline through the window. Bucky is facing it, no longer fidgeting or blinking or talking or doing any of the things Bucky does when he’s awake. It’s like last night never even happened.

Steve’s heart sinks.

Clint shoves Steve’s shoulder when he walks in. “The hell are you still doing here?”

“Must’ve fallen asleep,” Steve replies, and cracks his neck. His entire body aches from falling asleep in the chair.

Clint circles around the bed and tilts his head while he examines Bucky, brow furrowed in confusion. “Huh.”

“What?”

“His eyes are closed. His eyes are never closed.”

Steve sits up straighter, hopeful.

Clint takes a pen light out of the pocket of his scrubs and clicks it on with his thumb. He shines the light on Bucky’s face, then reaches up and pulls at his eyelid.

Bucky immediately snaps awake and grabs Clint’s wrist, twists it in his hand until he has Clint in a simple albeit painful arm lock.

“Ow ow ow,” Clint says, body contorted backward to avoid Bucky snapping his wrist. “Sorry, I just wanted to see if you were—”

“I’m not,” Bucky says with a sneer.

“Hey,” Steve interjects, standing from his chair and reaching a tentative hand toward Bucky’s shoulder. “You remember Clint, right? He’s a nurse, like me. We’re trying to help.”

Bucky leans back on the bed and lets go of Clint’s wrist.

Clint rubs it with his other hand and says, “So you were just sleeping.”

“Yeah,” Bucky replies, and mutters, “Sorry. You scared me is all.”

Clint moves toward the computer in the corner of the room and says, “Hey, no problem. I’ve had worse.”

Bucky looks up at Steve, confused, “You’re still here.”

“Told you I wasn’t going anywhere.”

“Don’t you have a family to go home to? A wife? ...A husband?”

In his peripheral vision, Steve can see Clint’s eyebrows shoot up.

“No,” Steve says, rubbing the back of his neck. “Just me.”

While anyone else would give him a pitying look, Bucky nods, the hint of a smile on his face in smug satisfaction, like he just proved a point to himself.

Steve adds, “But I should probably head home before Director Fury finds out. You think you can stay awake a while? I promise I’ll be back soon.”

With a wicked grin, Bucky replies, “If you’re what’s waiting for me at the finish line, a marathon’s worth the effort.”

Steve thinks that if Clint’s eyebrows raise any higher, they’re going to fly off into space. He also wonders if it’s possible for his own face to catch on fire from blushing too hard.

“Good. That’s...that’s good.” Steve reaches out and squeezes Bucky’s shoulder. His hand lingers there and he knows he stares at Bucky too long, grinning like a dumb blushing idiot, but he’s just so excited that Bucky is staring back that it takes Clint clearing his throat to distract them.

“Right,” Steve says, and backs toward the door. He bumps into the chair, then grabs his bag and backs into the wall, stammering, “I’ll uhh…I’ll be back after bit.”

“See you then,” Bucky replies, grin unwavering.

As he leaves the room, he hears Clint say, “It’s like I’m not even here.”

#

Steve runs home to shower, shave, and eat breakfast. He doesn’t even check the blinking light on his answering machine—yes, he still has an answering machine, and no, he still hasn’t bothered setting up the voicemail on his cellphone—before pulling his jacket back on and heading to the hospital again.

He makes the mistake of going in the employee entrance out of habit, thus passing the administrative wing of the hospital. Sam’s desk in the social services office faces a window that looks into the hallway, and Steve grits his teeth when Sam looks up as he walks by.

Sam’s out the office door and blocking Steve’s path in an instant.

“Where was that kinda speed during the 5k?” Steve asks, already attempting to lighten what he knows is going to be a rough conversation.

“First of all,” Sam replies, “you know I let you win. Second of all, we need to talk.”

Steve sighs and looks at his feet. “Yeah. Alright.”

Sam leads him into his office and shuts the door.

“I got some bad news about your boy,” he says, perching on the corner of his desk.

“He’s not my—” Steve begins, then stops himself and asks, “Wait, this isn’t about last night?”

Sam arches an eyebrow. “What happened last night?”

Steve figured Clint would have blabbed about it to the entire world and there would be crude comics drawn, posted to the billboard in the breakroom. He also figured that Fury would be calling him in to have a talk, and that Sam was just warning him.

“Nothing,” Steve says. “What’s the bad news?”

Sam never sugarcoats anything, which is probably what makes him such a damn good social worker to begin with. “Stark got ahold of Barnes’ case files and wants us to discharge him.”

“We can’t discharge Bucky. He’s not better yet,” Steve replies.

Sam hands Steve a file from his desk, a thick manilla folder with “Barnes, James B.” labeled on the side. “According to everything we can find, there’s nothing wrong with him to begin with.”

“What?” Steve asks, flipping through the file. It’s nothing he hasn’t seen before. The contents of the folder are mostly his own notes.

He flips to a letter co-authored by Drs. Romanoff and Banner. He skims it, and looks up at Sam again. “They think he’s faking it?”

Sam lowers his voice to the tone Steve knows he reserves for the aftermath of non-sugarcoated bad news. “There’s nothing to prove he isn’t.”

“Why would he fake it?”

“You know what it’s like out there. We both do. You come back, and home isn’t the same as it was, not because it’s changed, but because you have. And then nothing matters anymore, because there’s no ground under your feet. So you give up.”

“I don’t understand. You think he’s faking severe catatonia? Fugue states? Lying to us because he’s too lazy to keep fighting the war in his head?”

Sam holds up his hands, “No, I agree with you, but between Stark’s non-medical-professional eyes and Fury’s inability to see anything on a small scale, it looks like we’re helping a perfectly healthy individual with nowhere else to go. According to Fury, ‘This is a hospital, not a homeless shelter.’”

Steve stands from his chair and the floor shifts beneath him. Anger rolls around in his gut until it hurts to swallow around the lump in his throat. “We’re healthcare providers. We’re healers, and James Barnes is sick. We can’t turn him away on the ill-founded skepticism of two people who have never even met him.”

Sam sits silent for several moments before averting his eyes and replying, “They’re giving him another week.”

“To what?“ Steve asks, unable to hide the frustration in his voice. “Magically bounce back into reality and say he was faking it? And if he doesn’t, we’re just going to toss him out the front door? Shove a five-figure medical bill in his hands and tell him to pay up?”

Sam shakes his head. “Don’t take this out on me, man. I’m just as angry as you are—”

“No, you’re obviously not, because if you were, you’d be doing something about it.”

With that, Steve turns on his heel and storms out of Sam’s office.

#

Before he knows it, he’s in the psych unit, headed toward room 2517. He needs to talk to Natasha and Bruce, Fury, and maybe even Stark, but first he needs to check on Bucky.

He doesn’t knock this time, just walks right in and says, “Bucky.”

Bucky’s eyes are wide and he’s staring somewhere near the ceiling. Steve almost loses it right there, knowing he’s gone again, but then Bucky reaches over to the remote tethered to his bed and turns off the TV he’d been watching.

He looks at Steve and says, “I don’t remember the last time I watched TV, but it feels like it’s been decades.”

Relief hits Steve so hard that he has to sink down onto the chair he’d spent the prior night in.

“Hey, you okay?” Bucky asks.

Steve rubs a hand over his face and says, “Yeah, I’m fine. I can’t stay too long, though. I have some...things I gotta do.”

“Oh.” Bucky’s mouth twitches, a flickering frown.

Something wrenches in Steve’s heart when he sees it, and he shifts to the edge of the seat, reaches out and puts his hand over Bucky’s without thinking.

Bucky smiles again, twists his palm up, and squeezes Steve’s hand.

Then, like a train slamming into the side of his skull, Steve remembers something he learned in school, way back before his second tour, in a class called “Mind, Body, Consciousness, and Reality”. It turned out to be more philosophy than psychology, but Steve remembers devouring the textbook, the rantings of some guy named Zola who waxed about the unsteady notion of reality.

“Tokens,” Steve whispers, and pulls away to pat at his pockets to find one. “You need a token.”

“A what?” Bucky asks.

There. On the breast pocket of his jacket rests a small pinback button that Clint’s daughter had given him.

He takes it off and puts it in Bucky’s palm. “Here. This should help.”

Bucky turns it around in his hand, inspecting it. “What is it?”

The button is small, with two sets of red and white stripes around the edges. In the center is a blue circle with a white star in the middle of it.

“It’s the symbol of the superhero I played at Clint’s daughter’s party. From a comic book I’ve never heard of.”

“And it’s supposed to help me how?”

“It’s a token. There’s this guy, this psychologist, Zola, who theorized that people who experience dual realities, or dissociative identities, or frequent fugue states—any problem where a person’s perceived reality differs from the general perceived reality—can be anchored by a token.”

“How does it work?” Bucky asks. He continues inspecting it, twisting it around in his hand like he’s already trying to make an anchor of it.

“When you see your token in your other, uhh, world, I guess, it can serve as a trigger to remind you that you exist here too. Then the idea is that you start running the marathon between worlds so often that the distance becomes shorter until eventually maybe you don’t have to run it at all.”

Bucky levels a curious gaze at him, “Why didn’t Romanoff recommend this?”

Steve shrugs, “I mean, it’s a random theory pulled out of the head of a dead German philosopher in the forties. It’s not exactly a concept that’s been empirically validated.”

“But you feel comfortable recommending it to me.”

“I’m off the clock,” he says. When Bucky doesn’t reply, he adds, “Will you try it? For me?”

“On one condition,” Bucky begins, not looking up from where his eyes are locked on the button in his hand.

He sounds serious, and Steve worries it’s going to be something drastic. Nevertheless, he finds himself replying, “Sure, anything.”

Bucky looks at him again, gives him a crooked smile, and says, “Go out with me.”

**Author's Note:**

> You can find me on [tumblr](http://www.bettydays.tumblr.com) and/or [twitter](http://www.twitter.com/betty_days).


End file.
